What Happened to Jane Mayer When She Wrote About the Koch Brothers

Out of the blue in the fall of 2010, a blogger asked Jane Mayer, a writer with The New Yorker, how she felt about the private investigator who was digging into her background. Ms. Mayer thought the idea was a joke, she said this week. At a Christmas party a few months later, she ran into a former reporter who had been asked about helping with an investigation into another reporter on behalf of two conservative billionaires.

“The reporter had written a story they disliked,” Ms. Mayer recounts in “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” out this month from Doubleday. Her acquaintance told her, “‘It occurred to me afterward that the reporter they wanted to investigate might be you.’”

As it happened, Ms. Mayer had published a major story in the magazine that August about the brothers David and Charles Koch, and their role in cultivating the power of the Tea Party movement in 2010. Using a network of nonprofits and other donors, they had provided essential financial support for the political voices that have held sway in Republican politics since 2011. “Dark Money” chronicles the vast sums of money from the Koch brothers and other wealthy conservatives that have helped shape public dialogue in opposition to Democratic positions on climate change, the Affordable Care Act and tax policy.

Ms. Mayer began to take the rumored investigation seriously when she heard from her New Yorker editor that she was going to be accused — falsely — of plagiarism, stealing the work of other writers. A dossier of her supposed plagiarism had been provided to reporters at The New York Post and The Daily Caller, but the smears collapsed when the writers who were the purported victims made statements saying that it was nonsense, and that there had been no plagiarism whatsoever. Indeed, as one noted, Ms. Mayer had plainly credited his writing — though this was not mentioned in the bill of particulars that was passed around.

There was more. Ms. Mayer would learn that these same dark forces had dug into a friend from her college years, with some notion of using the friend’s later problems against her. “I’m 60,” Ms. Mayer noted. “That was a long time ago.”

(Ms. Mayer’s husband, William Hamilton, is an editor for The New York Times in Washington.)

Who was behind this?

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Jane MayerCreditJoe Kohen/Getty Images

Figuring that out took three years, Ms. Mayer said, and she writes that she traced it to a “boiler room” operation involving several people who have worked closely with Koch business concerns. But the private investigation firm may be of particular interest to New Yorkers.

“The firm, it appears, was Vigilant Resources International, whose founder and chairman, Howard Safir, had been New York City’s police commissioner under the former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani,” she writes in “Dark Money.”

Mr. Safir served as both the fire commissioner and the police commissioner during the Giuliani mayoralty. He left public office in 2000, a year before the end of Mr. Giuliani’s term, and went to work in the kind of all-purpose consultancy in security and investigations that thrived after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. Safir and his son, Adam, and daughter, Jennifer, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, work at Vigilant. The former commissioner could not be reached on Tuesday to discuss his role in the investigation into Ms. Mayer. Adam Safir, however, did speak cordially, briefly and unilluminatingly.

“I subscribe to The New Yorker and I read it,” Adam Safir said. “As far as what we do, we don’t talk about clients, whether we have them or don’t have them. Even answering the question would violate the policy of our business.”

Two other Washington figures identified by Ms. Mayer in the operation, Philip Ellender, who heads Koch’s government affairs arm, and Nancy Pfotenhauer, who has served as president of a nonprofit advocacy group funded by the Kochs, did not respond to messages requesting comment.

Asked about the campaign against Ms. Mayer and the investigation of her, Ken Spain, a spokesman for Koch Industries, issued a statement that criticized her writings on Koch and charged that they were “grossly inaccurate.”

Asked if he was saying that the investigation of Ms. Mayer had not happened, Mr. Spain replied: “We stand by the statement.”

Email: dwyer@nytimes.com Twitter: @jimdwyernyt

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: How Tables Were Turned on a Reporter . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe